Becoming Mahalo through Gratitude

Do you recall when we spoke of Spirit Spilling?

I am in love with my own emotions, the good, the bad, and the ugly, for I know they exist to teach me something I am far better off knowing. There’s a lot of self-talk that happens in my head, but my head’s job is to actually stop thinking and listen to the rest of me. Intention and intuition are pretty sacred concepts in my thinking.

Spirit Spilling is connected to Gratitude: When you are willing to spill openly, you are in a very joyful process of Becoming.

GRATITUDE: ~~~Become. From Webster - The state of being grateful; thankfulness. Within Mahalo - Become all you are capable of being, by using all your gifts, each and every one of them. Grow into every crevice of your capacity, filling it with worthiness. Test your limits joyfully, and with confidence palena ‘ole (without boundaries). Seek to complete yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. In doing so, you acknowledge who you are in a manner which appreciates what others have done for you. You create prosperity and abundance so you will have more to give.

Becoming is a way of entering this “state of being grateful” that Webster alludes to.

We all grow, and as we do, who do we become? Where do we eventually arrive? Chances are our strengths have emerged in the process, and wherever we may have ended up, we find much to be grateful for. I will give you a personal example; here are five different distinctions about me:

5 Things I am grateful for Becoming:

1. A girl, then woman, sister and daughter, wife and mom. Let’s just say I am quite positive I’d have made a lousy man! I love that there are both sexes, and I respect and admire men; I just know (appreciate and know!) where I best belong.

2. Corporate trained, then self-employed. Now that I am self-employed, nothing short of a little-choice crisis would send me back to working for someone else. There are great bosses out there; mine is primarily a creative lifestyle choice. However I do not regret my corporate experience at all. There were days here and there I would have gladly skipped, but altogether it gave me terrific context for the entrepreneurial mindset I now have.

3. Zealous manager before would-be leader. Some believe that by nature we reason things out in a certain way, either as a deductive reasoner (big picture first, then details) or as an inductive one (studying selective details first to make more sense of shaping the big picture.) By nature I am an inductive manager, but a deductive leader, and in terms of the workplace reinvention now my mission, I believe that knowing this helps me, so I am grateful that my experience mapped out this way.

4. A coach. This is similar to the female distinction of becoming for me; becoming a coach has sorted out teaching, training, coaching and mentoring for me in the most pleasing way of living my working life.

5. A writer and author. I do think there is a difference. For example, writing is usually about beginnings and scattered middles for me, whereas authoring is about finishing some string of thought well. And that is but the tip of the iceberg between them. Hmmm… another post for another day… more writing!

However I’m still within all of these processes of Becoming; life is not yet over for me! This is what I still have to do in my growing:

“Grow into every crevice of your capacity, filling it with worthiness. Test your limits joyfully, and with confidence palena ‘ole (without boundaries). Seek to complete yourself physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.”

Why?

“In doing so, you acknowledge who you are in a manner which appreciates what others have done for you. You create prosperity and abundance so you will have more to give.”

Remember the Mahalo Action Step I asked you to weave in your nightly ritual this month? Tonight, try to use your Nightly 5 Minutes to write out your 5 distinctions of becoming: What are the 5 things you are grateful for becoming, for you are still eager to grow into their full capacity?

These are those areas in which you are virtually guaranteed to be inspired, and gain quantum-leap surges of energy, and that is a HUGE thing to be Thankful for, which we shall consider next.

Meanwhile, tonight’s gratitude ritual will be a gift to you, and you will sleep well with this gratitude and appreciation of knowing who you have become, and how much more you can be. Sweet dreams!

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This was Becoming Mahalo through Gratitude.

Did you miss Knowing Mahalo through Appreciation? It was a back-story to this posting; here is an excerpt:

Appreciation is the ability we have to know those things that we alone have created for ourselves, and then stop long enough to savor them. Said another way, what we feel we truly know, is what we have created. We recognize their “significance and magnitude” as being of value to us because we are so fully aware of what we had to put into their coming to be; we lived through them.

Appreciation is a profound gift when we think about it this way, for it helps us know what is right with us instead of our focusing on what might be missing. Appreciation becomes this inbred human ability to be all we can be, appreciating the breadth of what is still possible. That is what we shall talk about next, with The Promise of Gratitude: Becoming.

We had started here: The 3-Way Promise of Mahalo: Appreciation, Gratitude, Thankfulness:

• Knowing Mahalo through Appreciation
• Becoming Mahalo through Gratitude
• Sharing Mahalo through Thankfulness

Comments

[tim]

Rosa:

I spent some time with this challenge/reflection this morning and came up with the following five things:

I am grateful for becoming:

1. A Learner
It's good to know that I not only have a lot to learn, but that I'm also continually learning how to learn.

2. A Father
Each stage of my four children's development is a new stage in my own journey of learning what it means to be a Dad.

3. A Writer
I'm continually willing to take the risks of writing. My hope is that my writing will end up communicating with others more than I could by other means.

4. An Equipper
I'm continually looking for ways to add value to those around me.

5. Intentional
I feel a greater sense of urgency in my life. My goal is to be a better steward of today then I was yesterday.

[Rosa Say]

Very cool Tim; yours is a list to look at often, feel very good about, and gain your inspiration from. Thank you so much for sharing it with us, giving everyone another example to learn from (learners teach so well!)

I really like how you connect a sense of urgency with being intentional.